This is just something that occasionally bugs the hell out of me whenever the memory comes up, and I've finally decided to talk about it.
At the end of high school in 2014 I was working at a mcdonalds at night unloading the truck to put stuff in the cold/dry storage for $7.25/h. I was 17 or 18 at the time and we were at Quantico Station, VA on base, as was the mcdonalds. At the time, I didn't really know anything about work and rights other than work sucks and they can't ask you some questions in an interview, so I chocked most stuff up to just work sucking as per usual.
So one night I'm unloading the stuff into storage and my manager/supervisor Jerome tells me to clock out and keep working, and I do it because I'm a dumb 17/18 year old who got told by their 30-something manager to do a thing. Then this keeps happening for a few more shifts and I'm getting annoyed at it because I don't want to have to do work I'm not sure I'm even getting paid for. So I come in one day to check the schedule like I normally do, get some fries, talk to a different manager/supervisor and tell her about not wanting to work after clocking out, and she says I should just tell Jerome that I'm not going to work after clocking out. Oh shit I can do that? I'm sure it won't cause any problems for me when I tell him that.
Next shift rolls around, Jerome tells me to clock out, I tell him no, he says “Okay”. I finish up my shift, go home, finish up the week. I come in the same time I normally do to check the schedule and I suddenly have no hours at all for the week. I remember just being happy that I didn't have to go in to a job I hated doing. I was still with my parents & going to community college from their GI bill, I didn't need the job, but I wanted to work anyways. So a week, two weeks, three weeks go by without any hours on the schedule. My name is still on the schedule itself, I haven't been fired, no write ups, no warnings, just no hours for an indefinite amount of time. I think it was after a month I finally went in and gave them the shirt and hat in a bag and quit.
I didn't know exactly why, but at the time and still now I felt like you shouldn't be able to just keep people off the schedule but still employed forever, or make people work without getting paid for it. From there I started paying more attention to stuff like that, figuring out what I can and can't do, what managers can't tell me to do. So almost 10 years later, here I am, venting about something you think wouldn't be OK to do on a military base of all places but happened anyways.